Non-volatile memory systems, such as flash memory, have been widely adopted for use in consumer products. Flash memory may be found in different forms, for example in the form of a portable memory card that can be carried between host devices or as a solid state disk (SSD) embedded in a host device. During periods of continuous writing, a failure may occur as a result of memory management or background operations that are performed during the sustained writing.
The failure may include a host buffer fill or accumulated time out. The host buffer may be filled when the background operations slow the write speed and the host is forced to maintain more data to be written in the buffer. When the amount of data the host has in the buffer exceeds the limit, there may be a host buffer fill error. The accumulated time out may include a failure observed in picture capture and video recording in some hosts where the host has an internal write timeout that is set for each chunk of data write. When the memory card's write operation takes longer than the timeout time period for completing one write multiple block the host times out and results in picture capture failure. Accumulated time out refers to the accumulated write operation duration (e.g., the time to write x number of blocks in a single write multiple block command) in the card, which may be caused by multiple block writes sent continuously. For a particular host, a picture may be corrupted or not saved due to the accumulated time out. Likewise, in case of video recording, a frame may be lost or recording may be stopped with an error message.